The Angry Dream Read Free Page B

alone?” I said.
    “Sure.” She turned and walked over to the hall, little spurts of dust rising from the carpet under her heels.
    She paused and looked back at me, not smiling. “I’m not leaving town, if that’s what you mean. I’m staying, Al—” She turned quickly and disappeared down the hall. I heard her open the door and cross the front porch, go down the steps into the yard. In a little while a car’s engine started and drove away.
    The hound returned, flapping into the room, and I dubbed him “Bunk” for no particular reason. Between us, we got most of the dust off the leather couch in the small room across the hall where my father used to sit and scheme. I brought in the lamp and filled it, lit it and put the blankets on the couch. Then I turned the lamp out and took my shoes off and stretched out.
    It was cold. Tomorrow I would fix the stove.
    You could hear the mice in the walls.
    Bunk was running up and down the upstairs hall in the dark, snuffling.
    “… him hanging by a rope to that old deer horns you shot when you were thirteen when he give you hell for it. The vaults was empty. Sheriff Prouty cut him down … the vaults was empty …”
    Morning was autumn again. Traces of frost lay pooled, patching whitely across the meadows to the woods and the hills. In the pale-blue sky, the sun was a glare of hard burning. On both sides of the valley, up the hills, wide and jagged scars, where too much timber had been felled, showed cruelly in the daylight. Somebody’s cornfield over there had been gouged man-deep, house-wide in three places, by erosion.
    Bunk insisted on coming to breakfast with me. I ate at the diner amid a grand silence.
    I wanted to get some supplies, some glass for a couple of broken windows at the house, and some tools—hammer, nails, broom—to clean the place up.
    I started toward the general store, then decided I’d better see Kirk Hartmann, if he still existed. Kirk was a country lawyer who had once been a friend.
    I drove down past the sawmill to the acreage of pine with the sprawling log house set far back from the road. Kirk was standing in the front yard smoking his pipe, staring straight up into the sky. The house had four additions on it and I knew Kirk had built them himself. He had not changed much, though there was a slight paunch that hadn’t been there eight years before.
    I parked the car and walked across the drainage ditch by the roadside on a springy plank set there for that purpose.
    “Hi, Kirk.”
    He did not move, waiting with that complete indifference to anything unusual that was a part of him. Possibly if his house that he had laboriously constructed of hand-hewn logs over a period of fifteen or more years abruptly exploded skyhigh, Kirk would simply stand there smoking his pipe and lazily say, “Now, I wonder what could have caused that?”
    “Those flying saucers,” he said.
    “What?”
    “I say, those flying saucers. I don’t know, Al—but I keep watching.”
    “I see.”
    He pointed his pipe at the sky. “Five times I swear I’ve seen them. Got every book about ‘em. Damned interesting.”
    “You believe in them?”
    “Probably not. But it’s fun.” He sucked on his pipe, grimaced and spat and knocked the pipe out against the trunk of a tall pine. He was a big man with a lazy attitude that was utterly false. He looked too lazy to walk ten feet, his eyes hooded, broad flat lips seldom moving. His hair was black and straight and he was wearing brown tweed trousers and an old ragged blue cardigan.
    “I was up in Cross Glen,” he said. “Poking around. Hell of a field of iron pyrites up there. Anyway, saw one of ‘em and I got a picture of it. Coming straight across the valley.”
    “Saw what?”
    “Flying saucer. I sent it to the paper in Westfield. Guy came out, damned near drove me crazy—he’d made friends with considerable of Martian pilots, you see?” He shook his head. “I just keep an eye out, now—no more